Beamforming or precoding information needs to be communicated from a transmitter, (e.g., a base station), to receiver, (e.g., a wireless transmit/receive unit (WTRU)), to avoid a channel mismatch between transmitting and receiving signals. This is in particularly important for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) data demodulation when beamforming and precoding are used. When a receiver uses incorrect channel responses for data detection, significant performance degradation can occur.
Generally, beamforming or precoding information may be communicated using explicit control signaling, particularly when the transmitter and receiver are restricted to the use of limited sets of antenna weight coefficients for beamforming and precoding. The limited sets of antenna weight coefficients are sometimes referred to as a beamforming or precoding codebook. Explicit signaling to communicate beamforming or precoding information from a transmitter to a receiver may incur large signaling overhead, particularly for a large size codebook. When the transmitter and the receiver are not restricted to the use limited sets of antenna weight coefficients for beamforming and precoding, the explicit signaling of beamforming or precoding information via a control channel is no longer possible. Since incorrect effective channel response information or precoding information results in significant bit error rate (BER) and/or block error rate (BLER) floors, efficient methods for obtaining accurate effective channel response information are desirable. Additionally, efficient schemes for achieving satisfactory performance and overhead trade-off are desirable.